Tag: growth

How difficulties can be creative…

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Flog og Fjaere 2.JPG

A different way of seeing the challenges in life, and maybe a more helpful way of looking at the slow diversions which life obliges us to take:

Une difficulte est une lumiere. Une difficulte insurmontable est un soleil. Paul Valery

(A difficulty is a light; an insurmountable difficulty is a sun)

We tend to perceive difficulty as disturbance. Ironically, difficulty can be a great friend of creativity… I love these lines from Paul Valery: this is a completely different way of considering the awkward, the uneven, and the difficult. Deep within us, there is a terrible impulse and drive toward perfection. We want everything flattened into one shape. We do not like unexpected shapes… The imagination in its loyalty to possibility often takes the curved path rather than the linear way. Such risk and openness inherit the harvest of creativity, beauty and spirit.

 John O’Donohue Anam Chara

photo kilabs

Learning to be open

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Lilium longiflorum var. longiflorum (2).jpg

I sit before flowers
hoping they will train me in the art
of opening up

Shane Koyczan,  22 May 1976, Canadian poet and writer

photo katrina wiese

What Springtime teaches us

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Heaven and Earth give themselves.

Air, water, plants, animals, and humans give themselves to each other.

It is in this giving-themselves-to-each-other that we actually live.

Whether you appreciate it or not, it is true.

Kodo Sawaki, 1880 – 1965, Japanese Sōtō Zen teacher

Becoming free from those places we are stuck

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Narrow gorge carved in the sandstone of Escalante Canyon, 05-1972. (6919674170).jpg

More on the desert theme which is central to Lent.

The original desert experience was that of the Hebrew slaves who escaped from Egypt. But Egypt has always been understood as more than just a place. Indeed the word for “Egypt” in Hebrew – Mitzraim – means “a narrow place.” So “going out from Egypt” can mean going from a narrow place where we are stuck, from repeating patterns of behaviour, from a sense of ourselves as weak or defective, to a wider sense,  a place where we are free. The desert is a symbol for the space to face what holds us back, which we often think cannot be changed and will keep us stuck forever: 

The only permanent thing about our behaviour patterns

is our belief that they are so

Moshe Feldenkrais 

What holds meaning and mystery for you?

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Israel - desert2.jpg

The start of the season of Lent – an interior simplification and going into the desert. Seeing what is essential through a letting go of some of the distractions and non-essentials in our lives:

I like to ask one of the questions I have found most useful in setting intentions and making choices: Where does the energy want to go now?  I ask this question and sit with the sense of the life-force within. . . . following my breath, letting go of my to-do lists and all the things I think I “should” get to. . . .and every time- if I am willing –  I get a sense of where the energy that is manifest in this one small human life, is drawn. This isn’t a passive exercise – it’s not “just” about “going with the flow.” It’s discerning where our essential being is drawn, what holds meaning and mystery for us now, and then coming into alignment with that flow to take actions, make choices, offer what we are to the world

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

photo tiia monto

Everything is an occasion for growth

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Rock path 4891036716.jpg

Our instinct is to run away from the difficult moments in our life,

when in fact they may be sent to teach us and help us grow:

Medicine and illness heal one another

The whole world is medicine

Yunmen, 862 – 949

photo CGP grey